Roger Federer was special already back in '99, says former player

In an interview, former Slovakia's player recalled his three-set loss, 6-3 6-7 6-3, to Roger Federer. He said: "That was special. We knew he would have been good and I thought that he would come to Slovenia for the first and last year.

Even if once he promised me he would have come to Ljubljana. It's fascinating that Roger remembered that clash. It was pretty unusual. He remembered me in 2002 and then we met in Dubai with Blaz Kavcic. We spoke for two years about it."

"I had other needs in life, a young family... Things in life change. In Davis Cup in Slovenia at the time we started from zero and over three years we reached Group I. We had very low ranked players but we managed to achieve it.

Blaz Kavcic and Grego Zemlja took a lot of time to repeat this result. I was also the first participant in the Barcelona Olympic Games and at the age of 17, I played for Yugoslavia's team. I am sad about not being a professional player anymore.

But looking back we did not have the right condition and most of all we did not have the knowledge. We were working by ourselves. I remember that at 15 years of age I went through the war." Peter Krajan remembered Croatia's Davis Cup title in 2018: "We won our matches in singles and that was important.

Our team was great and we learned a lot from that 2016 final when we lost to Argentina. The new format will benefit the players, but we may not see packed crowds like before. When we won the title, we did not expect to be welcomed by so many people in Croatia, tennis is popular but not as much as football.

It was a very nice surprise to see that tennis has so many followers in our country. It's difficult to say why Croatia is so successful in tennis. Everything started with Goran Ivanisevic, from then other guys started following him."